The best completely Free Windows Software - Freeware. No shareware, no nagware, no adware.
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Teracopy
It's happened to all of us. you have a giant batch of files that you're copying or moving to another location. You're about 15 minutes in. Something happens. The USB drive is removed, or you have to shut down your PC. Your only option is to start all over, not knowing what was succesfully copied.
Teracopy does one thing only, but it does that one thing very well. it copies and moves files. Sounds like overkill? That's what I thought until I started using it. Let's say you're organizing your video library. With Teracopy, you don't have to wait for each file to copy over before moving on to the next. You just keep copying. The software queues up your files, so your system isn't slowed down. You can pause and resume transfers or clear something out of the queue. If there's a copying error, it will retry several times.
Oh, and it's faster. When copying from one drive to another, it's a lot faster. I don't really understand how it does it, but this quote is from their website: "TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives." I can't comment on that, I will take their word for it, but I can vouch that it is definitely a lot more zippy.
PC Wizard
System information tools provide a convenient way to give you information about, hmm, your system. Hardware information from your keyboard to your RAM. Software information about running processes and installed programs. All details of your computer are laid out neatly for information or troubleshooting.
Duplicate Commander
It's pretty much inevitable that you will wind up with several copies of the exact same file saved on your local drives. Whether it is the same video clip, the same cute kitty photo that people keep emailing you or perhaps your term paper that you keep saving in different places.
Not only does this eat up drive space, it also makes it very, very hard to keep track of the correct, most-recent version of the file you are looking for.
Xmarks
For those that don't know, bookmark managers allow you to save, manage and share your bookmarks from computer to computer.
There are quite a few online bookmark services out there. Some are browser-specific. Some are social-centric. The best all-around bookmark manager / bookmark synchronizer is Xmarks. It integrates with all major browsers and operation systems and works flawlessly.
Features:
File Renamer Basic
Now that everyone carries a camera with them at all times - and has an mp3 player - and pretty much stores their lives and records of their lives in digital files, it's become difficult for us to make sense of all this data. A bulk file renamer simplifies the process of keeping up with the vast reams of data we produce by providing a simple method of calling our files what they are.
Everything
Hard drives are massive. You have thousands of pictures, videos and documents. How do you find anything?
Everything runs in the background, using a very tiny amount of system resources, but it indexes and finds anything on your computer instantly. Really. Instantly. I mean, like faster than Speed Racer. Faster than the Flash. You know, fast.
Ninite
Just pick your apps and click Get Installer. Ninite does the rest — fully automatic.
Notepad++
PSPad
Here's some of the features:
Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding
Auto-completion
You can edit several documents at the same time.
You have two views at same time.
Regular Expression Search/Replace supported
Drag 'N' Drop
File Status Auto-detection
Zoom in and zoom out
Bookmark
Brace and Indent guideline Highlighting
Macro recording and playback
7-Zip File Manager
Once upon a time, almost everyone had shareware WinZip on their machines, and almost nobody registered it. (Before that it was PKZip, but I'm dating myself.) When Windows XP was unveiled with limited zip file compatibility, the demand for decompression utilities slowed down. But now, people are pushing files all over the internet in buckets of formats. RAR, JAR, BIN, CAB, ISO, IMG and more.
WhatInStartup
A utility junkie like me winds up with all kinds of programs that start automatically every time I restart my computer, which, admittedly, is not often. Even if you don't test out every piece of software under the sun like I do, you probably have at least a few things starting up that don't really need to. Some of these are "agents", stubs of larger programs that make the software seem like it loads more quickly when you decide to use it. Some are auto-updaters that check to see if a more-recent version of software is available. And some, unfortunately, might be spyware.
Dimension 4
That clock in the lower-right-hand corner of your screen? It's wrong. Unless have a tool to sync your computer's time, that is. Dimension 4 syncs your clock to an official time server via SNTP or TCP. If you're not sure what that means, don't worry about it. Just get it.
SyncBack
I'm confident that you have full up-to-date backups of your important files or even your entire hard drives. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I'm sorry, give me a second. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. What's that? You've been remiss? Welcome to the club. Sad to say, but very few people back up their data like they should. Like crashing on a motorcycle or hurting a knee playing football, hard drive failures are inevitable. If you ride, play, or use a computer long enough, you're going to crash, hurt, or lose a drive.
SyncBack is solid, straightforward tool that allows you to synchronize or perform complete backups of whatever you choose, including entire drives, to another directory, drive, medium, ftp server, or network location. If you like, you can configure SyncBack to start automatically and perform it's magic without user involvement.
CCleaner
Clean up your mess, doggone it! Blindingly fast tool that will remove temp files, unused files, etc. Clean up your browser cache, cookies, third-party application temp files. Even includes a registry scanner.
Restoration
A long, long time ago in an operating system far, far away there was a DOS command called "undelete". Now that we have the Recycle Bin, Microsoft has decided that we no longer need to undelete files, but they are sadly mistaken.
If you inadvertantly clear out your recycle bin or permanently delete a file by accident, Restoration will come to the rescue. It's small, requires no installation, and will list all the recoverable files on your Windows NTFS or FAT system. I even recovered a song from my iPod.
Free Launch Bar
Who says there's no such thing as a free launch?
This is a very handy little utility that replaces Windows standard quick launch bar. It allows you to combine your shortcuts into groups, and to assign hotkeys to each group.
MyUninstaller
A nice alternative to the native Windows Add/Remove program. It gives you a lot more information about your installed programs and runs significantly faster. It will tell you the product name, company, version, uninstall string, installation folder and more.
WinDirStat
Very handy tool to get an overview of how much disk space is used, how much is left, and where the files are. WinDirStat has three views to display its information, a directory list, a treemap, and an extension list which shows information about file types.
4T Tray Minimizer
Minimize any running application to the system tray or hide it completely. Very handy for things that you want running all the time but want to get out of your face or to clean up the taskbar. (or even hide from your boss)
Ditto
HovText
HovText is a much simpler tool than Ditto, but it does one thing that Ditto doesn't do, it "removes any formatting from the clipboard. Any text in the clipboard will be pasted as raw text without any HTML code, font size, color or layout etc." If this is something you need, well, you just have to have it. It also remembers the last 10 things copied to your clipboard.
Ditto is quite a bit more advanced. "It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... "
Virtual Dimension
Organize your applications over "virtual" desktops. In other words, you can have several different workspaces set up on you machine that you can switch between without closing applications or moving anything around. Many can't live without this feature. Thank goodness there is freeware.
Clickie
I install this immediately on any Windows box that I get. It's amazing how much I use it.
LC ISO Creator
Extract your CD or DVDs to ISO image files. Perfect to use in conjunction with Daemon Tools. Requires no installation. Runs perfectly.
xplorer² lite
An extended file manager is basically Windows Explorer on steroids. It will support dual-pane windows, will often preview files, will allow filtering by whatever you want to filter by, will mass-rename, etc.
Daemon Tools
Run any CD or DVD image on your hard drive as if it was an actual CD. There are a few reasons you would want to do this. It will run much faster than a real CD. You don't have to find your CD underneath your pile of stuff. No scratches. Download images from the net and use them without burning CDs. A very handy tool very nicely executed.
Convert
Want to know how many barleycorns are in a furlong? Or hides in an acre? Find out with this handy calculator. Formerly, I listed Unit Conversion Utility, which is still a fine program, but Convert has a slightly slicker interface and more, different kinds of units.
Ranish Partition Manager
Run Windows XP, Linux and Windows 95 all on one computer. There are several non-free hard drive partitioning tools, but only one that is excellent free software. Ranish Partition Manager allows you to create up to 30 primary partitions on a single drive and includes a boot manager as well.
